Notes of News | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 6, 1879

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 53, No. 6.

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Notes of News.

—England has 2,759 periodicals.

—Cuba spends nothing for public education.

—In Thibodeaux, La., there are 50 lepers. The original one arrived there 20 years ago.

—The national debt of Great Britain is £775,000,000; that of France is £940,000,000.

—Chicago and Indianapolis, 210 miles apart, converse by telephone.

—A sapphire, weighing two pounds and worth $50,000, has been discovered by two boys in Ceylon.

—There is a serious famine in upper Egypt. Relief has been forwarded.

—The Russians are taking active measures to prevent the spread of the plague.

—There has been an increase of 439 schools in South Carolina the past year.

—7,000 miners are idle in Durham county, England. The distress is the greatest experienced since the great strike in 1844.

—Nearly 95 out of every 100 of the 138,407 children of Connecticut between four and sixteen years of age, attended school last year.

—The Coroner reports for 1878, 95 suicides and 27 homicides for San Francisco, a city of 320,000 inhabitants.

—A San Francisco paper estimates that from 50,000 to 100,000 boxes of raisins were put up in California last year.

—A Cincinnati engineer has just completed a contract with French capitalists to build a narrow-gauge railroad from Jerusalem to Jaffa.

—Among the 19 who united with the church at Amherst, Mass., the first Sabbath of the year, were a Japanese and an Armenian.

—It speaks poorly for domestic felicity in San Francisco, that last year there were 284 divorces there, or one to every eight marriages.

—There has been skating lately in Atlanta, Ga., for the first time in twenty years, and a thousand pounds of ice were cut and packed for the first time in that neighborhood.

—The new French Protestant daily paper is to be started in Paris, April 16, with Mr. Leon Pilatte of Nice, as editor. Its title is to be “Le Réformateur Anti-Clérical et Républicain.”

—About $20,000 has been received in voluntary subscriptions for building a church in Berlin to be called a “Church of Thanks,” to commemorate the escape of the emperor from the assassin.

—Pope Leo is proposing to create a Scotch cardinal. Scotland has now six Roman Catholic bishops, 272 priests, and 264 churches and chapels; in 1851 it had only 118 priests and 97 churches and chapels.

—There has been an unusual amount of sickness and death among the members of Congress this session, four having died since the beginning of the holiday season. Drunkenness and late hours, it is believed, are in part responsible.

—The government of Samoa has sent this country a mat six feet square, made of cocoanut fiber. It is 300 years old, and valued at $2000. Inside of it, as a token of good-will, was wrapped up the recent Samoan treaty with our government.

—A recent ruling of the Post-office Department excludes matter printed by the papyrographic process, electric pen, and type-writer, from the mails, except on payment of the first-class or letter rate of postage. Some firms say that this order will increase their postage bills $1,000 a year.

—During the late war 594,000 Russian soldiers poured down through Roumania into Turkey. Of these 58,800 were sent back by rail wounded, and 62,150 ill; 31,000 sick went home to Odessa by sea; 29,000 are still in hospital; 31,000 laid their bones in Roumania, and 99,000 perished in Bulgaria.

—The most powerful microscope ever constructed was recently exhibited before the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr. E. Cutter, of Boston. It was made by R. A. Tolles, with “a one seventy-fifth objective,” requiring a working distance of only one two hundred and fiftieth of an inch, and magnifies 6,250,000 times!

—The alphabets of the world vary from 12 letters in the Sandwich Islands to 202 in the Ethiopic, the Burmese having 19, the Italian 20, the Bengalese 21, the Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and Samaritan 22 each, the French 23, the Greek 24, the Latin 25, the German, Dutch, and English 26 each, the Spanish 27, the Arabic 28, the Persian 32, the Russian 41, and the Sanscrit 50.

—Dr. Garrett, of England, has invented a novel torpedo-boat. This boat, constructed of iron, can be made to sink, rise, move forward or backward, above or below the surface of the water, at the will of the manipulator. By means of long, straight waterproof bags, the operator gets the free use of his arms outside of his boat to work the torpedo.

—The Christian Weekly records an example recently set at a funeral, which is worthy of extensive imitation. A young and lovely lady died, and her father, instead of spending a large amount of money on an ostentatious funeral, buried her plainly, and presented a liberal check to a benevolent institution in which his daughter was much interested.

—In Dublin, at a conference between some gentlemen who were planning for a library for working men, and a delegation of working men, several of the latter, who were Roman Catholics, vigorously opposed the censorship of the priests in regard to the books to be selected for the library. This looks as though the Irish mind were rousing.

—A dispatch from Rome says that, in addition to the proposed appointment of several Vicars Apostolic in parts of America destitute of episcopal churches, the Vatican intends to establish several new bishoprics in the United States. The pope has sent a circular to bishops outside of Europe, with the view of extending the collection of Peter’s Pence in all countries of the world.

—Pope Leo XIII. is reported to be engaged in drawing up the plan of an agreement to be entered into by all the European Powers with a view to the repression of Socialistic and International tendencies. The Vatican authorities are working out the details, and the whole will, when completed, be dispatched to the Papal representatives abroad for submission to the governments to which they are accredited.

The Human and Equine Population of the Globe.

A recent number of Petermann’s “Mittheilungen” contains fresh information regarding the population of the globe. According to these new researches the globe has now about 1,439,145,300 inhabitants. Europe contains 310,398,480; Asia, 831,000,000; Africa, 205,210,500; Australia and Polynesia, 4,413,000; America, 86,116,000. This gives an average of 500 inhabitants per square mile of the surface of the globe. After calculating the number of human beings on the globe, the German statisticians turn their attention to the number of horses. This is estimated at about 58,000,000; of which number the contingent of Russia is about 21,750,000; that of the United States, 9,504,000; the Argentine Republic, 4,000,000; Germany, 3,352,000; Canada, 2,264,000; Great Britain, 2,255,000; Hungary, 2,179,000; Austria, 1,367,000; Turkey, 1,100,000; France, nearly 3,000,000, etc.